Poverty and joblessness, fuel for ’67 riot, even worse today

A man begs for money from a patron leaving one of Midtown’s critically acclaimed restaurants, where a roasted mushroom salad is $14.

Bill McGraw
/ Bridge Magazine

While Detroit has seen positive changes in the police department and the inclusion of African Americans in civic life since 1967, the decline of manufacturing and flight of people over the past five decades have contributed to significantly higher levels of unemployment and impoverished residents in the city. Reynolds Farley, a retired University of Michigan sociologist, notes that in 1950, Detroit had the nation’s “most prosperous black population.”

But the city’s black community is now one of the nation’s poorest, with much of the blame placed on decades of job loss, especially in auto and government jobs, and the migration of middle-class white and African Americans to the suburbs, where jobs are more plentiful. Below, some jarring numbers showing how far black Detroiters have economically regressed since the troubles of 1967.

Percent of owner-occupied households

Homes in the more upscale Rosedale Park-Grandmont neighborhood on the city’s west side.

Credit Bill McGraw

In 1967, housing conditions for black Detroiters were substandard to those of white Detroiters. But home ownership for black Detroiters in the late 1960s and early 1970s was higher than for any black community in the United States even though 120,000 black Detroiters still lived in slum conditions during the riot era.

Five decades later, as Detroit became much poorer, the percentage of residents owning homes has dropped, especially among whites. The foreclosure crisis after 2005 hit both white and black Detroiters hard, and cost taxpayers millions. The Detroit News reported last year that there have been 65,000 mortgage foreclosures in the city since 2005. Of those, 36,400 homes (56 percent) were blighted or abandoned, with some 13,000 slated for demolition, at a cost of $195 million.

Median income: African Americans lose ground

Detroit's loss of prosperity is reflected in the abandonment of its once-busy thoroughfares. Above: E. 7 Mile.

Just after the riot, when black Detroiters’ income was three-quarters of white income, the black community in Detroit was one of the most prosperous in the nation. Today, though, black income in Detroit has slipped to a little more than half of white income, as African American elsewhere have made gains. According to the Pew Research Center, since the 1960s, household-income growth for African-Americans has outpaced that of whites. Median adjusted household income for blacks is now 59.2% that of whites, up slightly from 55.3% in 1967 (though in dollar terms the gap has widened).

People in poverty: Twice the percentage as 1967

Man sleeping on sidewalk in the mid-1960s.

Credit (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library)

By 1967, poverty was the focus of “wars” at both the federal and local levels. President Lyndon Johnson convinced Congress to pass extensive anti-poverty legislation in 1964 and 1965. Even before the federal government stepped in, Detroit Mayor Jerry Cavanagh, who took office in 1962, became one of the first big-city bosses to enact programs to help poor residents, including medical and dental services, job banks and work training. After the riot, though, critics raised questions about the effectiveness of Cavanagh’s anti-poverty efforts.

Aggressive government action to help the poor faded over the decades, and Detroit continued to lose jobs at a steady rate. For many years, Detroit has been one of the nation’s poorest big cities. By 2016, the city had received international attention for its large number of home foreclosures and water shutoffs, and a study this year published in The Journal of the American Medical Association showed life expectancies for Detroiters – 77.7 years — ranked among the shortest for residents of U.S. cities.

Unemployment: Far higher today

Long lines for unemployment checks in Detroit in the 1980s.

Credit (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library)

The flight of industry from Detroit began after World War II, and the city lost 165,000 jobs between 1955 and 1963. But for a few years before 1967 the local economy boomed, and Mayor Jerome Cavanagh’s manpower programs helped keep the unemployment rate low. Joblessness, though, was growing again by the time of the civil disturbance in 1967. The city’s 6.2 unemployment rate then was the highest it had been in five years, according to historian Sidney Fine. Unemployment in the riot areas was about twice the overall city rate, and among youths ages 18 to 24 the rate was estimated to be between 25 and 30 percent. In academic studies of the disturbance, experts found a strong correlation between self-identified rioters and unemployment, especially for rioters who had been out of work for a long time.

By 2016, five more decades of deindustrialization had taken its toll, especially on black Detroiters. High-tech jobs have grown, but there has been no major job creation for the low-educated. In April of this year, city unemployment stood at 9.1 percent, far higher than 1967, but a dramatic improvement for the decade. In 2009, city unemployment exceeded 25 percent and just two years ago stood at 16.3 percent. But the black/white disparity remains. In 2014, the most recent year available for racial comparisons, 4.9 percent of white men in Detroit were unemployed, compared with 14.4 of black men. White women unemployment was at 5.3 percent, black women at 11.9 percent.

(You can see all of our Detroit Journalism Cooperative coverage here.)

Support for the Detroit Journalism Cooperative on Michigan Radio comes from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Renaissance Journalism's Michigan Reporting Initiative, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Related Content

“Let’s go take my daddy out of that place. I miss him why is he there?”

These were the words of a three-year-old Dana whose father had just been detained to be deported.

The mother, Mireya, says the little girl cried every night, saying she wanted her father home and was confused as to why he was in there in the first place, demanding that he is brought home to her. The mother says on one visit to the detention facility, the daughter asked her to break the glass, unbeknown to the child that she would probably never see her father free any time soon.

Sitting at a picnic table in Chandler Park, by census estimates the poorest area of the city of Detroit, John Henry Irelang talked about poverty in his neighborhood. But, empathy for his neighbors was not the only reason he cried.

He cried because of lost opportunity.

“I put in 89 days,” he said. That’s one day short from transitioning from a temporary worker to a full time worker. “I was paid $5 an hour while the guy working next to me doing the same job was making $11.”

Politicians and media reports indicate Detroit is in the middle of an economic resurgence. That’s true for the central business districts. That’s not the case for many residents in the poorest neighborhoods.

“Some people just don’t have the hope. And, especially living in an environment like this, it’s kind of hard. It’s kind of hard. It’s very stressful,” said Alita Burton.

Bill McGraw reports for Bridge, a Michigan Radio partner in the Detroit Journalism Cooperative.

The Black Lives Matter movement was peaking a year ago, when protesters took to the streets of Baltimore over the death of a black man in police custody. On the same day, an angry crowd gathered on Evergreen Road on Detroit’s west side.

The situation on Evergreen quickly grew tense. An agent from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who was on a task force with Detroit police had shot and killed a 20-­year-old black Detroiter, Terrance Kellom, a parole absconder who was wanted for armed robbery.

“Huge crowd. We were surrounded,” Assistant Chief Steven Dolunt recalled in late March. “They were calling for the chief. I called him. I said, ‘You need to get here right away. Now.’’’

The chief of police is James Craig. The crowd knew him because in nearly three years at the top of the Detroit Police Department, he has become such a familiar figure on city streets and media outlets that some people, both friends and foes, call him “Hollywood.”

Craig’s style is low­-key and controlled, more Woodward Avenue than Sunset Strip, but he doesn’t mind the nickname. He says his visibility is part of a deliberate strategy to communicate with Detroiters.